When She Let Him Break
by Skeren Dreamera
Summary: Mikoto really wasn't sure when she stopped protecting her son, but she knew, with certainty, that she shouldn't have.


**When She Let Him Break**

He was falling apart. She knew it, could see it in every too tightly wound movement her baby showed the world, perfectly controlled, perfectly _empty_.

It was perhaps the most terrible thing she'd ever had to watch happen in silence, and she couldn't fix it. Fixing it would mean stepping in and trying to fix things she couldn't. Her baby boy was doing his very best, and she didn't want to ruin it for him. She couldn't dare to speak up and reach out to him when he was trying so very hard to ease away from her, from _them._

Even Sasuke only held so much sway over his brother these days, and it made her ache, knowing that even that was being strained by the harshness that was ambition. Oh, she knew, with every fiber of her being, exactly what was tearing her boy to shreds inside, but what could she do? If she moved against Fugaku openly, he would simply hide from her, and she _had_ tried to be subtle. Covert help was only so helpful if there was no way to make sure that it would be acted upon as intended.

After all, her baby was an ANBU, and he held his secrets close with his heart closer still, even though it was hurting him. Especially recently. And that morning...

He'd snapped. She'd heard it all the way to the kitchen, when he'd snarled at the officers trying to find out about Shisui, and it scared her that he was hurting so badly that he would turn to bad temper at all. He wasn't like that.

But she could do nothing. Not now. It would be too little too late for a boy who had once stared at her with wide, fascinated eyes and asked if the clouds had their own village like Konoha. A little boy who had once known how to giggle before he'd turned solemn, having seen his first dead person at four just because he'd wanted to go see his favorite cousin and someone had tried to snatch him up as bait. A little boy who had once let himself be held and sung to and _loved_.

He wasn't that anymore though, not the way he'd been when he was tiny and innocent and oh so _very_ precious. He yearned, and she knew he didn't know he did, because it was a hollow in his innocence that had been taken too young for him to understand it shouldn't have been there at all. She had had so very little to offer her baby as his father had chipped away more and more of the sweet darling he'd been. And she'd let him.

She'd let her husband rip away and away to expose the maturity that shouldn't have been there but was because her baby had wanted nothing more than to please for so very long. He'd wanted everyone around him to be happy. Always did he want that. Even now, as he cracked and faltered and refused to look away from his path to see there might be help if he but looked _up_...

It wasn't going to happen though. She was a coward, letting her sweet, innocent baby be crushed under the clan and Konoha and _being shinobi_. She knew that wasn't what he'd wanted. He'd wanted to help, not hurt, and that, too, was slowly getting ripped out of his hands, bit by bit, day by day.

So she looked away. She knew and pulled back, clasped her hands to her chest before she would go to sleep at night and pretend that both her babies were happy. She pretended that Sasuke wasn't fretting in the mornings when his brother wouldn't look at him. She pretended not to see how Itachi flinched away from touches more and more. She pretended that doting on one and ignoring the other was okay, because she couldn't risk. She had to _trust_.

She knew she failed him.

So days later, after these thoughts first spun and spun, when she found herself stirring from an oddly lucid daze on a day she couldn't fully remember, it was with a strange sense of relief. It was even oddly right, on coming out of such a state, that she was seeing blood on her baby's blade in their home. She knew it wasn't her youngest's blood. Itachi would never do such a thing. But her? Fugaku?

She had no blame in her heart, no matter who the blood belonged to, for her Itachi, especially after all they'd done to him and had intended to keep on doing had the plans come to their intended conclusion. It didn't matter in her heart if her part had been largely that of silence. She had still failed him.

Now, there was no time for silence, and as she watched his eyes, so empty and aching, she gave her her sweetest, most loving smile and shifted her body so there would be no hindrances to his mission. It was, after all, a logical solution to a very treasonous problem, and her baby was nothing it not utterly loyal.

She just hoped he was appreciated for it, someday, by someone who would treat him fairly.

"I'm sorry I didn't do better for you my Itachi. That I wasn't a better mother."

And if she heard the start of a choked off sob for her words, then it no longer mattered because everything was gone, then, as was she.

But at least she'd tried, and when the end came, that was all she'd had left to offer the boy.

Love, beaten and tattered and so badly neglected, but love all the same.


End file.
